130 Years On, the Great Detective Sherlock Holmes Is a Composite of 70 Actors and 200-Plus Screen Roles

Let's look at how Sherlock Holmes became what he is today.

It is hard to say what Arthur Conan Doyle would have made of the BBC's 2012 series Sherlock, but the Conan Doyle Estate, which manages the rights to his work, once set rules for how the Holmes image could be used. As far back as 1942, when it licensed Universal Pictures to make a run of Holmes films, it required that "the films be drawn directly from Conan Doyle's work." In other words, it wanted adaptations of Holmes to stay as close to the original as possible.

As the character drifted into the public domain, fewer and fewer people paid the Estate's demands any attention. So it is no surprise that you can now find all sorts of Holmeses out there — versions so unlike one another that if you covered up the name "Sherlock Holmes," you might not realize they were meant to be the same fictional man.

The "Holmes" Benedict Cumberbatch plays in Sherlock is less Sherlock Holmes than a detective version of Sheldon Cooper. He is arrogant, with emotional intelligence somewhere below zero — a long way from the Holmes of the novels, where Watson takes to him almost the moment they meet, and where Holmes holds rather special feelings for Irene Adler, "the woman."

In the 2015 film Mr. Holmes, Ian McKellen played a 93-year-old Holmes, his memory failing, old and frail. Such a Holmes is rare. In the original stories, a retired Holmes turns up only in "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane," and even there he is plainly still in good shape, as Holmes himself tells it: "Winter and summer alike he kept up his swimming, and since I am a swimmer myself, I often ran into him."

The most subversive rewrite came from Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock Holmes. His Holmes is nothing like the stock English gentleman; he even knows a little Wing Chun. In Downey's own words, it "felt like going back to my warrior side." Britain's Telegraph simply called this Holmes a "Victorian 007."

It has been 130 years since Sherlock Holmes first appeared in the novel A Study in Scarlet, and in that time the character has taken so many forms that no one can count them all. IMDb lists 76 Holmes films; Guinness World Records reckons that more than 70 actors have played him in over 200 films — and that leaves out the stage plays, radio dramas, and every other art form he has turned up in. No other character can claim such a crowded performance history.

Conan Doyle probably bears much of the blame for that. Raymond Chandler, another master of detective fiction, once sized the character up this way: Holmes amounted to little more than a few memorable exchanges of dialogue and a handful of odd habits — showy feats of deduction, the violin, the drugs. "Holmes is less a full character than a set of attractive mannerisms."

The fullest, most detailed description of Holmes comes in the second chapter of A Study in Scarlet, "The Science of Deduction." Through Watson's eyes, Holmes is "easy to live with," "quiet in his ways," a man who "keeps regular, temperate habits," who is "full of energy" at work, who "sometimes goes a whole day without a word, sitting motionless as if lost in thought," who stands "over six feet" and is "excessively lean," whose eyes are "sharp" and give him an air of being "especially alert and decisive," and who is "a man of great determination."

As writing, that is barely more than a pile of adjectives — a flat character, a mask. The Hollywood screenwriter Robert McKee argued in his book Story that character is built out of choices and inner conflict. Almost none of that shows up in Conan Doyle's Holmes.

Conan Doyle's own limits produced this. In 1886, when he wrote A Study in Scarlet, detective fiction was nowhere near a settled genre. The only model he had to work from was the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, whose detective Dupin made the best prototype for Holmes.

"Even if Conan Doyle's letters and diaries from that period do not record it, his stories make it plain that he drew directly on these two writers. He used the same story structure as Poe, near-identical characters; he copied, imitated, and pilfered whatever he found of value," wrote Richard Lancelyn Green, regarded as the world's leading Holmes scholar, in an article published in 1987.

Conan Doyle also saw what was wrong with Poe's work: it ran long, it was overwrought, it was thick with false feeling. So he chose to turn detective fiction into a genre of its own, pushing the puzzle and its answer — the crime itself and the work of solving it — to the front, and trimming back everything off the main line.

As Conan Doyle put it in the preface to one edition, "characterization must be limited by the theme, and must serve it." Working that way, he sharpened a few signature traits in Holmes and turned the man into a set of labels. The most obvious label is deduction: Holmes can read a stranger's trade and temperament off his appearance and a few small details. Leaning so hard on these labeled traits is a large part of why Holmes can feel thin.

But that, in turn, is exactly what makes him so appealing. "The vagueness and incompleteness of the Holmes image is precisely what makes him an irresistible pop icon — everyone can project his own reading onto it," Charles McGrath wrote in a 2010 piece.

"Holmes's image on film depends on people's choices, and is enriched by those choices," Thomas Leitch wrote in Film Adaptation and Its Discontents. "[Those choices include] which text people pick to adapt, what they change, and what they feel free to ignore altogether."

That has produced something remarkable: the image of Holmes was never Conan Doyle's alone. It is the joint work of nearly every artist who has ever touched the character.

Picture Holmes and you probably picture a deerstalker (which is also, incidentally, how Conan dresses up as Holmes in Detective Conan). Many people take the deerstalker for Holmes's signature look, yet nowhere in Conan Doyle's writing is a "deerstalker" mentioned. At most, in a few country scenes, Holmes is said to be wearing a hat.

The man who tied the deerstalker to Holmes was Sidney Paget, an illustrator who began drawing the Holmes stories in 1891. By his daughter's account, Paget simply loved wearing a deerstalker himself, so it was only natural that he put one on Holmes's head. The American stage actor William Gillette later made the look famous by wearing a deerstalker in the play Sherlock Holmes, which settled the hat's "authority" for good.

Paget's other major contribution was Holmes's face. He used his own brother, Walter Paget, as the model, because his brother was the better looking of the two. Conan Doyle later admitted in Memories and Adventures that "from the point of view of attracting women readers, this was possibly the correct thing to do."

As Paget's drawings show, Conan Doyle's attitude toward adaptations wavered over the years, but on the whole he stayed fairly open to them.

In 1899 the first Holmes story outside print appeared: the play Sherlock Holmes, adapted by the William Gillette mentioned above. While writing it, Gillette asked Conan Doyle whether he might end the play with Holmes's wedding. That was a long way from the novels — Holmes felt something special for exactly one woman, Irene Adler, and held firmly against marriage — but Conan Doyle told him anyway: "You may marry him, or murder him, or do anything you like to him."

With Conan Doyle's tacit blessing, the play went on to enrich and reshape the Holmes image enormously. After more than 1,300 performances, Gillette's own face replaced the one in Paget's illustrations as the standard Holmes. There is a good story about their first meeting: when Gillette appeared before Conan Doyle in full costume, Conan Doyle felt he was looking at the real Sherlock Holmes.

Gillette also invented the famous line: "Elementary, my dear Watson." To this day people still post online in surprise: "I only just found out that line never appears in the novels."

"William Gillette, simply by binding himself so tightly to the role, shaped the look of Holmes for far longer than his own run on stage, and set a template for how future actors would play the part," wrote Ashley Polasek, a Holmes scholar, in her doctoral dissertation.

One point bears repeating: Gillette's play came in 1899, only 13 years after A Study in Scarlet was published. Conan Doyle was still young and would keep writing Holmes novels for a long time yet. Even so, thanks to the vagueness of Holmes's own character and Conan Doyle's willingness to let others have him, the part had already shown how far it could be stretched.

That settled the next 100-odd years: Holmes would come before audiences in every imaginable guise, and each era and each actor would pour an entirely different spirit into him.

After Gillette, the next "milestone" Holmes came from Basil Rathbone, who played the part in 14 films made by 20th Century Fox and Universal Pictures between 1939 and 1946. That series shaped the character in two notable ways.

Before Rathbone, Watson barely registered in the Holmes stories. In "The Adventure of the Three Garridebs" Holmes does panic when Watson is shot, but elsewhere Conan Doyle described Watson as Holmes's "rather stupid friend."

Rathbone was the first actor to put the real friendship between Holmes and Watson on screen, partly because off-screen he was close friends with Nigel Bruce, who played Watson. The two men's real affection carried into the films, giving the Holmes-Watson relationship a warmth nothing earlier had. Bruce also became the first Watson paid roughly as much as his Holmes.

Rathbone took great pride in this. In his later memoir, he too credited the on-screen friendship as a key reason his Holmes films worked.

Universal also experimented heavily with subject matter in the series. Having applied the techniques of the monster movies it was known for, the studio went further and dropped Holmes into the Second World War, working for the British government to catch Nazi spies. That film was Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, from 1942.

It was plainly wartime propaganda. Conan Doyle had done the same thing himself: in 1917 he wrote "His Last Bow," in which Holmes also hunts a German spy. Look at the date — 1917 — and that too was a work written in the service of politics, during the First World War.

As the fighting escalated, Universal released Sherlock Holmes in Washington in 1943, an original story that once again set Holmes against Nazi spies.

The television series that ran from 1984 to 1994 is widely held to be the version closest to Conan Doyle's novels. Many critics believe its star, Jeremy Brett, lost himself to the part. Brett once said he needed to let Holmes go in order to get his own life back.

And yet even an actor who gave himself over that completely added two new qualities to Holmes: humor and sex appeal. Neither sounds strange today; most people would now count both as standard equipment for a "good man." In Brett's day, that shift was only beginning, but to hold an audience these became qualities Holmes needed.

No era, of course, has loaded Holmes with more meanings than this one. The "Cumberbatch" Holmes of Sherlock is more of an oddball; the "Iron Man" Holmes of Sherlock Holmes is a 007; the "Gandalf" Holmes of Mr. Holmes shows us an old man.

"It is less likely that the changing image of Holmes reflects a change in how we understand him than that Holmes is changing simply because film itself has changed," Charles McGrath wrote. "Our appreciation of him now has to be measured against the history of film."

As film genres have multiplied, Holmes, one of the most recognizable fictional characters there is, has clearly been reworked into every kind of genre picture. New elements keep getting added to keep audiences watching. Take the faint romantic charge between Holmes and Watson in Sherlock: the writers absolutely meant it. In the first episode, Holmes meets Watson and immediately asks him to share a flat. Their landlady takes one look and says there's another bedroom upstairs, if they'll be needing it.

"Holmes evolved out of many earlier characters, but the whole is far more interesting than any of its parts." As Richard Lancelyn Green wrote, the Holmes still loved today was never Conan Doyle's creation alone. He is a figure laid down layer by layer by writers, actors, and screenwriters together.

Cover image: stills from Sherlock and Sherlock Holmes